Daniel Forsyth

Data | Machine Learning | Analytics

After a long weekend of NBA All-Star game festivities I stumbled upon Greg Reda's excellent blog post about web scraping on Twitter. In it he goes over how to find and use API's to scrape data from webpages. The example he uses is the NBA's very own stats website, which to my surprise provides a lot of very interesting data. I decided to dig a little deeper and see what I could find. The shot log API from NBA.com returns data about every shot a player took during a game. These data points include how much time was left…

For the past month I have been studying abroad in London. One of the first things I noticed when arriving here was how much better the public transportation system was compared to what I am used to in Philadelphia. Whether you are taking the tube or the bus it is clean, quick, and the easiest way to get around the city. It took a few weeks to become fully acclimated with all the stops and routes but when everything starts connecting it becomes very easy to get around. Depending on traffic my commute to class is about a fifteen-minute bus…

The 2014 World Cup will go down as one of the best in recent history. It featured countless headlines, from Germany asserting themselves as the top team in the world by humiliating the entire nation of Brazil 7-1 on their own turf and eventually winning it all. To the end of Spanish world soccer dominance and Luis Suarez continuing with his animalistic tendencies. And lets not forget James Rodriguez making sure he’s a household name with this gem: I had wanted to do a project using the Instagram API for a while and thought the world cup final would…

Tuesday night I wrote a short blog post about how I used python to find cheap tickets to a music festival. I finished up pretty late so I decided to post it online the next morning. I woke up pretty early and posted the article on a few websites around seven. I started watching my google analytics page and the hits started coming in very fast, much faster than normal. First it was twenty, then thirty, and shortly after fifty people were reading within minutes of submitting. I looked at the map and most of the hits were from Europe.…

One of my favorite parts of the summer is attending music festivals. Most festivals offer "early bird" tickets for a significantly lower price than general admission, however they typically sell out well before the actual event. Whether it is laziness, lack of money, or just plain stupidity I never seem to purchase these early bird tickets on time and have to look to different options. In recent years I have found success using Craigslist last minute, around a week before the festival, and getting tickets around or even lower than the early bird/pre sale prices. This year instead of…

Since its inception eight years ago Jack Dorsey's Twitter has grown into one of the most popular websites on the internet. With over a billion registered users and an average of five hundred million tweets sent per day Twitter is creating incredible amounts of data. Many novel ideas have come out of the question of what to do with all of this data, from predicting stocks to more recently predicting crime. When I was first learning python one of the first libraries I came across was Tweepy, an open source, easy to use python library for accessing the Twitter API.…